If it weren't for the fact that most restaurant food kinda sucks, I'd never cook.
I hate cooking. I don’t think I’m particularly bad at it, but honestly, I’m not a fan. I dunno. Maybe it’s growing on me. In retaliation, if I’m cooking, I’m doing it my way. I get excited to try new things, I like leafing through cooking magazines for mouth watering pictures, but in all honesty, cooking kinda blows. I usually make it through half of the recipe before I’m picking from it what I find appealing and dumping the rest. I just find no joy in following along, unless it’s something new and unfamiliar, and I want to figure it out first before I reject their suggestions out of hand.
There’s just no fun in following a stupid recipe. Yeah, sure, I take to heart time and temperature… my goal is not to make anyone ill. But once your recipe tells me to use saffron, we’re off the reservation. I’m not using an $19 piece of flower lint to flavor a meal. I don’t care if it does taste like unicorn tears. Especially if I’m making something like stew… fuck if I can even remotely hang in there halfway through the ingredients anyway, it’s fucking stew! Isn’t it, by definition, what’s left in your fridge/pantry?
My favorite recipes are tragically a mark of my heritage. Those mother fuckers just aren’t written down. My sister claims Grandma taught her how to make strudel. I’m sure she has it on a post-it buried somewhere … and dammit if it wasn’t fucking amazing. Note to self, ask about recipe… I don’t know, maybe it’s just me that gets into the chemistry lab of the kitchen and decides I’m fucking boss and I’m going to do it however I want. That’s how she made her strudel, and it was heaven. Imagine the best part of a pie – the goo soaked into homemade crust. Like she made an actually tasty apple pie with cinnamon, but then scraped out the mushy yucky fruit, rolled up the soft crust, put a little sugar on it and baked it, letting those granules of sugar burn and make a caramelized crust of amazing around this perfectly moist spiral of vaguely apple soft cinnamon goodness inside.
I have this suspicion that my mom actually uses recipes, but… I also highly suspect she wanders off into her own idea halfway through most of them. She can make mini muffins out of thin air using zucchini, cranberries, or lemons. She has the same Betty Crocker cookbook from 50 some odd years ago, but then again, baking is a little more scientific so it’s possible she’s a lot more capable of following directions than I am. I know I’ve seen her just throw random shit together, and it comes out great. "Oh, i just put some applesauce in instead of sugar." It’s my dad you have to worry about. He’ll take last night’s spaghetti and heat it in a frying pan, making it like it was fried rice, crisping up some of the noodles and dropping whatever else he found in the fridge. Spaghetti and left over mashed potatoes, coming up… in one scoop.
Recipes are like fashion magazines… MAYBE there’s something attractive in there, or some idea you never thought to add…But hell if you’re gonna find me actually believing you can mix a large print with stripes or that celery tastes good in anything. Even vegetarian magazines used actual meat in the pictures to make the food look palatable, just like that model isn’t wearing some off the rack item without some behind-the-scenes tailoring or photoshop to make it look good.
The obvious draw back to my inability to let some little piece of paper tell me what to do is that I have no one else to blame if it sucks, and if it was awesome, I will absolutely never be able to make it again. And just to make SURE of that, even if I could remember what I put in, there are the times I randomly remove bits of it. If it didn’t fit in the pot I will randomly remove stuff and toss it to make room. Or I add something else halfway through, crossing my fingers.
Tonight we’re having stew… instead of the 4 carrots, 3 potatos, and celery and an onion it called for, there are 5 carrots, a crate of cherry tomatoes, a bag of mini onions and half a large onion, some farro I tossed in, a can of stewed tomatos… one sweet potato, one regular potato, some small purple tiny potatos… and then randomly removed bits of potato when it no longer fit in the crock pot. I forgot the garlic and added it a little while ago, along with spilling in a few more farro grains because if you ask me, sometimes stew misses something in the crevices to soak up the flavor. I failed to look at the clock, but I have a feeling it won’t be done until 7pm or so, but that’s merely a guess. I just can’t be bothered to worry about it.
Also, Dear Husband, since I know you never read this, this is the ideal place to tell you...you got another summons for jury duty. :-/
No comments:
Post a Comment